Battleangel

Will they ever stop using the word “piracy” in official documents? Anyway, this is officially confirming what we already knew. The US lets it be known that they will apply pressure to aid its copyright pimps abroad (WAPO via /.). What that will amount to in the long run is uncertain. For now, we’re seeing diplomatic strong-arming and blackmail. Down the line, I wouldn’t surprised if the next thing will be a “war on pirates” (since the other “wars” on such broad ideas as drugs, poverty and terror are going so well). Now that would really be something to crunch, linguistically speaking. Talk about polemical tabloid terminology and a match made in heaven.

Not that the US hasn’t already been doing this sort of thing covertly and on the side. Remember how they rushed in to write Iraqi copyright laws as soon as Baghdad was under control, way ahead of more pressing matters like infrastructure or law and order. Or a year later when they introduced new legislation in Iraq that outlawed the saving of seeds and ruined biodiversity in what is one of the cradles of agriculture. Oh, and then they re-wrote copyright laws in Afghanistan as well. See a pattern emerging?

The article also provides further corroboration of the claim that The Pirate Bay was taken down due to US pressure. The peculiar raid being just a month after a high-level visit to the US by Swedish representatives.

Claes Hammar, Swedish minister for trade and economic affairs, said U.S. authorities noted that copyrighted Swedish material, as well as U.S. movies and music, was being stolen on the Pirate Bay.

“We don’t like to be seen as negligent and losing out rather than cooperating with the U.S. and other markets,” Hammar said.

It should be dawning, even on the most hardened fans of all things American, that the US is a much bigger and broader threat than previously realized. It is amusing though to see conservatives and liberals speak out in ways that (unwittingly perhaps) puts them on a collision course with their tyrannical fatherland of choice. One has to admit that no one can make enemies quite like the US. And that it is ironic that this finally stirs some anti-american rhetoric among the Swedish right. The killing of a quarter of million Iraqis however didn’t prove to be worth their time though. I don’t claim to be any less egotistical, I’m just saying that it’s ironic.